Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum Will Eventually Achieve 1 Million Transactions Per Second

Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum Will Eventually Achieve 1 Million Transactions Per Second

The creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin had earlier explained recently that the Ethereum network will be able to eventually process 1 million transactions each second and will also have the potential to have more than 100 million transactions per second.

Back in September 2017, during an interview, Vitalik Buterin had mentioned the following,

“Bitcoin is currently processing a bit less than three transactions per second and if it goes close to four, it is already at peak capacity. Ethereum has been doing five per second and if it goes above six, then it is also at peak capacity. On the other hand, Uber on average does 12 rides per second, PayPal several hundred, Visa several thousand, major stock exchanges tens of thousands, and in IoT, you’re talking hundreds of thousands per second.”

Adding that, “Second-layer scaling solutions that are currently being tested on the Ethereum testnet could enable the Ethereum blockchain network to support large-scale decentralized applications with millions of users by taking an innovative approach in optimizing the blockchain.”

Plasma which is a solution that is developed by Butern operates very similar to that of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. It enables the Ethereum to make the processing of micropayments successful by creating child blockchain networks within the main blockchains, this thereby ensures that the information process moves swiftly, hence also leveraging the security of protocol of Ethereum. This makes sure that the network in not vulnerable to any of the potential threats and other attacks.

Buterin explains, “The reason I think layer 1 and layer 2 [networks] are complementary is because ultimately, if you look at the math, the scalability gains from the layer 1 improvements and layer 2 improvements do ultimately multiply with each other. If you have a Sharding solution, the Sharding solution itself might increase the scalability of Ethereum by a factor of 100, or eventually even more. But then, if you do Plasma on top of the scalability solution, then what that means is, you’re not just doing 100 times of the amount of activity but you are doing 100 times the amount of entrances, the amount of exits, and despite resolutions.”

1 Million Tx / Second

Buterin later goes on to say that the synergy between solutions of layer 1 and layer 2 would only increase the scalability of Ethereum by 10,000X. This allows the network to process millions of transactions per second, thereby enabling it to support most applications seamlessly.

He goes to add, “So if you get a 100x from Sharding and a 100x from Plasma, those two basically give you a 10,000x scalability gain, which basically means blockchains will be powerful enough to handle most applications most people are trying to do with them.”